Unity has a major shadowing problem with directional lights like the Sun and I want to help fix it. The issue is in directional light with shadows and without contact shadows, contact shadows are not a good solution they are very inaccurate compared to correct direct light shadowing, but without contact shadows the normal shadows of Unity Directional lights for the Sun have a major flaw, no matter what settings are given they do not correctly shade when objects are facing them especially human faces directly into the Sun. It can be seen in the shots below, especially in the nostrils and around the eyes and face in general in the second shot without contact shadows facing the Sun. I would much prefer that contact shadows were not needed and they should not be if shadowing was done correctly especially on the Sun. Should I submit this as a Bug or an Enhancement Request?
Character In Shadows looks quite ok with shadowing correctly in nostrils and around face.
Character In Direct Sunlight with No Contact Shadows has very bad and unrealistic shadowing in nostrils and around eyes and face in general.
Character In Direct Sunlight with Contact Shadows has better shadowing in nostrils and around eyes and face in general.
I mean, this is the issue contact shadows are supposed to help with, so what you’re asking is for a solution to a problem that is already solved, while rejecting the solution that is already there.
You can have a separate high resolution shadow map for the characters (like they did in the blacksmith many years ago), but that’s about it: https://blog.unity.com/technology/unique-character-shadows-in-the-blacksmith
The only way to fully “solve” this would be for Unity to invent a completely new method for shadows. Shadow tech has been stale for a long long time (filtering has improved somewhat, but the rest is good ancient cascade splits and biases), I’m not convinced a new paradigm that solves a lot of these issues can’t exist.
But Unity is the company that plays catch up, they don’t move things forward.
So, in what ways would like to see the existing solution be improved? What is inaccurate about contact shadows?
You could try raytraced shadows
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/Ray-Traced-Shadows.html
But other than that, I agree with AcidArrow. I also know a game that used a separate high resolution shadow map around the player character.
Ok thanks, I was just checking if anyone else wanted this done and confirming my current work around with contact shadows, ask a different question and get the answer you want ;).
At the moment I set the distance settings to get roughly what I want so only close up gets contact shadows. Would anyone else want a change to enable Contact Shadows to be restricted to a particular lighting layer? I only want to use Contact Shadows for close details on characters, they are too unstable on scenery and for far away or large objects as the camera moves towards them over distance.
